


a feeble cadence

by bishopsknifetrick



Series: avengers: endgame fix-it fics [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Fix-It, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Tony Stark Needs a Hug, im hurt, they :(
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 02:28:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18651064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bishopsknifetrick/pseuds/bishopsknifetrick
Summary: (Avengers: Endgame spoilers ahead.)Somewhere in the palace, Tony’s heart still beats. Weakly, faintly, sickly; it’s a delicate meter, a feeble cadence drowned out by the world moving forward without him. But it’sthere.“Mr. Stark is alive,” Peter quietly reminds himself, sinking in his seat. “He’s just resting.”





	a feeble cadence

**Author's Note:**

> related to this fic is [this one](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18622489), but it's unnecessary to read before this one :)

When he woke up, he woke up slowly, over the course of weeks.

The scans showed that brain activity was picking up, and eventually one day Tony opened his eyes. He only opened them for a few minutes, and he couldn’t comprehend anything around him, but it meant he was getting better. No one was visiting at the time because it was late already, but Shuri made sure to relay the news to everyone anxiously awaiting the fate of the Earth’s mightiest hero. Pepper wept that day.

He didn’t open his eyes again until the next week when he stayed awake for ten minutes. Pepper and Morgan were there this time, and Pepper wept again when her husband looked at her, delirious from his extended sleep and the drugs coursing through his body, and, almost inaudibly, murmured “ _Pep?_ ” before falling unconscious.

That was three months ago. Peter’s going on a flight to see Tony today.

He buckles in, his thoughts racing at the speed of light. Since he’s an Avenger—he still can’t get over that—and a friend of Tony’s, King T’Challa arranged for him to be flown in on one of his ships. He’s accompanied by Okoye, who diligently prepares the plane for takeoff. Peter’s traveling lightly; enough clothes to last him the duration of his stay in Wakanda, his laptop, toiletries, cash. None of his books, though. He’s a good student, but today he’s putting aside anything related to schoolwork and focusing solely on seeing his mentor. He can’t focus on schoolwork, not when memories of what happened keep bubbling up like acidic water from a hot spring.

The look in Tony’s eyes. He wouldn’t blink. His eyes, they didn’t move, and yet he was staring at Pepper, trying to look away so she wouldn’t have to watch as he fell further towards death and at the same time trying so hard to absorb every last detail of her face, but barely registering a damn thing. And, God, the Infinity Stones may have fixed everything, but it was almost like they sapped Tony’s very being from him. His whole right side was burned raw—scorched human flesh and sizzling metal made for a revolting smell, but Peter didn’t pay attention to that, not when Tony was dying—and… and, well, he heard it took them hours to remove the suit from him on that side because the metal had welded to his skin.

“—Peter, are you okay?”

Peter forces himself back into the present, realizes he had started to cry. He swallows with difficulty and uses the back of his hand to wipe away the tears. He’s careful not to handle the flowers in his lap too roughly. The plane’s engines come to life, and it begins to rumble as its thrusters lift it off the ground. Okoye looks back at him, a look of concern and sympathy written on her face. Peter takes a deep breath, sniffling, and leans his head back against his seat as he closes his eyes and nods. He holds the flowers a little tighter.

“Yeah. No, yeah.”

He takes Advil later during the flight, but it does nothing to help him.

 

Peter hops off the plane, Okoye following closely behind him. He isn’t allowed to see Tony quite yet—Okoye told him earlier that Princess Shuri was currently running tests on him with her team of doctors. Which is fine, because Peter needs to get to the room he’s going to be staying in for the next couple of days or so. He thinks for a moment about what the results from Tony’s tests will be and almost chokes.

Okay. Maybe he isn’t fine. But who could blame him?

One of the Dora Milaje escorts him into the palace. Its vast halls and intricate architecture never fail to strike him with awe and wonder. Peter wonders, for a second, if anyone’s jealous of his special privileges—he’s an Avenger visiting one of his own, but he’s still a kid—and briefly panics over whether or not he should have just gotten a room in one of the local hotels. The soldier leads him down a hall and stops him in front of a door; she opens it for him, and he awkwardly mumbles a “thanks” and steps inside.

It’s simply decorated, with off-white walls and flooring and the furniture is accented with dark grey. Peter sets his duffel bag on the floor by the bed and puts the flowers on the nightstand, then turns to look at the Dora, who stands firm and upright with her spear.

“Is there anything else you need, Mr. Parker?” She says, looking him in the eye. Flustered, Peter shakes his head no, and the Dora nods once before closing the door and leaving. He hears her footsteps go down the hall: heavy, fast, confident.

He sits on the edge of the bed, hangs his head, clasps his hands together as he exhales sharply through his mouth. Tony is alive, he tells himself. Just resting.

Peter opens his duffel and pulls out his laptop. Under any other circumstances, he’d go out and explore the city—he loves browsing the market stands and talking to the families running them, loves attempting to learn the language, even occasionally visits Bucky and his goats, and by extension Steve, ‘cause he’s always where Bucky is. But this time around, the only thing he can do is mindlessly refresh his browser and switch between apps again and again like a tiger restlessly pacing his cage.

He opens a document. Might as well get some work done if he isn’t going out. It’s blank. The cursor blinks at a steady pace. He stares at it, stares at the cursor, hovers his fingers over the home row, and when he looks down at his hands they’re shaking. He unsteadily rubs his left palm with his thumb, takes a deep breath. Somewhere in the palace, Tony’s heart still beats. Weakly, faintly, sickly; it’s a delicate meter, a feeble cadence drowned out by the world moving forward without him. But it’s _there._

“Mr. Stark is alive,” Peter quietly reminds himself, sinking in his seat. “He’s just _resting._ ”

 

Tony didn’t wake up at all the day before. Shuri had come down to tell him personally about the news: there was a complication and they had to keep Tony under, but things were fine now and he should be able to wake up sometime soon, most likely before Peter has to leave Wakanda.

That didn’t make him feel any better at all, but he doesn’t have the heart to tell his friend that.

So he’s out sitting on a log, plucking at the kimoyo beads Shuri had handed him earlier, watching Bucky do the same thing he did before... before...

“Stevie, you’re not stuck in the fence, you’re just being a dramatic bitch!”

Peter zones back in to hear something quite troubling, but he sees Bucky looking in the direction of a brown and white goat. It bleats at him, but it pulls its head out from between the fence boards. Does it really understand what he’s saying, or has it done this enough times to know what to do when it hears that tone of voice?

“You named one of your goats after Captain Rogers?” Peter asks, looking up from where he’s sitting at Bucky.

“Yeah. Don’t tell him, but Stevie’s the dumbest one of them all.”

“What, does he not listen to you talk to your goats?”

“He does. I just don’t say anything bad about Stevie when he’s around. For all that punk knows, it’s just a gesture of affection.” Bucky tosses a bale of hay aside. For a man still wanted by over a hundred countries, he seems to be doing pretty well. He’s tired, though.

The kimoyo beads whir to life; Bucky looks down at his own wrist for a second before looking at Peter, as if to say “it’s yours”. Peter taps the beads a couple of times, briefly forgetting what Shuri told him about how to use them, then has a little moment of triumph in his head when Shuri’s voice comes through.

“Parker,” She says, “Stark is waking up.”

And she doesn’t have to say anything else before Peter’s launching himself off the log, startling a goat that had wandered by him. He throws Shuri a hasty “I’m on my way” before he hangs up with her. He looks at Bucky, who gestures for him to go.

“Aren’t you coming?” Peter asks, and it’s subtle, but he can see a shadow of... something fall over Bucky’s face. Guilt, maybe? Why would he feel that way?

“Maybe... maybe some other time,” He murmurs, looking away from Peter. “I think... I think he’d be happier to see you. Don’t think he wants to see me now.”

Peter hesitates, because he’s a curious kid and he wants to poke at whatever Bucky’s thinking about, but he’s also a courteous kid and just leaves it be. The other heroes all think he’s naïve—sometimes he is—but he’s observant; no one is as good at hiding things from kids as they think they are. Something happened between the two of them, but Peter won’t question it because it isn’t his business.

“Alright... I’m gonna go. I’ll see you later,” Peter says, trailing off at the end. “Tell Steve I said hi if you see him later?”

“‘Course,” Bucky says, then waves him off.

And Peter all but runs off to the palace, regretting that he didn’t bring his suit with him this time around; swinging around to wherever he needed to go in New York really spoiled him.

 

It’s awful, every time he goes to see Tony.

The burns cover almost the whole right side of his face, his neck, and his arm... his arm’s ruined. The doctors tried their best to perform mesh grafts, and it got better with time, but burns that bad don’t just go away. Tony’s hair most likely won’t grow back where it burned, even with the skin grafts, and he’ll be disfigured for the rest of his life, but... God. Nobody’s going to judge the person who brought back half the universe, but if Tony wakes up and hates what he sees in the mirror...

Peter grips the flowers in his hands as he enters the room. They’re not as vibrant as the day before, and they’re starting to wilt, but he had chosen the best ones at the shop he could find. He thinks the flowers smell nice, but they’re overpowered by the scent of chemicals. The monitor by the bed beeps steadily like a metronome, hums a song with Tony as the beat. The door creaks; Tony doesn’t move.

Peter settles in a seat by the bed, scoots it closer to Tony. There’s a small table by the bed, so he puts the flowers there. There are already flowers sitting in a vase, but they’re browning—it’s been about a week since someone last visited.

Peter looks at Tony, a plethora of emotions threatening to boil over. His chest hurts to look at the wounds Tony sustained from snapping away the other army, sustained from wielding all six Infinity Stones and becoming the most powerful being in the universe, even if just for a moment. And even though Tony’s been unconscious for months, been resting for over a year, he still looks unimaginably exhausted, like he’s been fighting an army and holding the weight of the universe on his shoulders at the same time since before he was born. And to be honest? That isn’t that far from the truth.

“...Hey, Mr. Stark,” Peter begins, his voice low, “Last time I saw you was, what, three months ago?”

He chuckles. Tony doesn’t move.

“So, uh, I’m in my second semester now. Which is crazy, ‘cause, y’know, I was in my second semester sophomore year when you picked me up to fight in Germany. That was—four years ago, almost five, or, no, technically—Jesus, _nine_ years ago? Because I was... away... for five years.” Peter takes a shaky breath, uses his thumb to wipe his eyes. “But, uhm, yeah, that was a while ago. It’s wild, I didn’t wanna go to Germany ‘cause I, ‘cause I had homework. And now I’m, I’m studying chemical engineering.”

He goes on for ten more minutes, and when he finishes, there’s no response for another few minutes. Peter’s lips begin to quiver as he leans forward and rests his elbows on his thighs, hanging his head low and getting frustrated when a strand of hair falls in front of his face. He pushes it aside and tries to keep it together when it falls back down. He stays like that for a few more minutes, his leg bouncing restlessly and jostling his head.

 _At least move,_ he thinks. _Twitch a finger. Squeeze your eyes. Give me something to tell Pepper and Morgan when I come home. Help me let them know you’re going to be okay._ Please.

“Come on, Tony...” Peter whispers, his voice shaking as he covers his eyes with his hands in an effort to keep the tears at bay.

He doesn’t hear the rustle of fabric. It’s almost inaudible; if the room weren’t so quiet, he wouldn’t have heard it. But he does, and his heart skips a beat, and he thinks he’s imagining things, doubts himself—but he looks up slowly at the bed when he hears,

“ _Hey, Peter._ ”

**Author's Note:**

> endgame pissed me off can you tell


End file.
